I really need to start using this again

Zack Snyder seems to be directing everything DC for the forseeable future, and it’s terrible. 300 was an awful film, the exuberant superviolence style of Snyder was horribly disparate from the restrained subject matter in Watchmen, and Man of Steel was just unpleasant. 

I’ve noticed a worrying tendency to only look up musicians after they’re dead. Although I suppose there’s a pragmatism to that, like a much grimmer version of only watching TV shows that are over.

Terrible Finale

Superman Batman Apocalypse had a TERRIBLE finale. Darkseid starts the fight in proper form. He beat up Superman without too much trouble because, you know, he’s Darkseid. He can do that sort of thing. Then he fights Supergirl, and suddenly she can beat him in a fight (even though she’s worse than Superman) and Omega Beams are both inaccurate AND weak. Superman gets sun-charged, okay. Both of them survive PROLONGED Omega Beam blasts. That’s absurd! By DC standards, the fact that Superman can survive a single shot is remarkable. And seeing them in action makes me think the writers don’t get how they work-they teleport things (more or less), they don’t start fires and cause explosions! If Supergirl’s getting hit by an Omega Beam for 30 seconds, as it shows, she should be a cloud of constituent atoms floating through the air, not lightly bruised. And then they teleport him to space and he freezes. Darkseid doesn’t freeze in space! Almost nothing freezes in space! Humans boil! That was terrible.

Looper Logic

I just saw Looper, and am a mix of confused and angry. Mostly, it’s because they imply the kid’s fate is a stable time loop (time travel thing caused by itself, kind of), but that is contradicted by the Joe thing. Joe 1 is shot to death by Joe 2, who grows up to go back and kill the kid, who is protected by Joe 3. Joe 3 believes that the kid is turned evil due to the actions of Joe 2, who only went back in time to stop the kid from becoming evil. But that can’t be what happened. In Joe 2’s world, there was never a Joe to go back and mess with the kid, because he successfully killed Joe 1 (I don’t know why the timeline is messy for him). However, the world with a kid who never was messed with by the tragedy brought by a Joe is the world where we know he becomes a horrible telekinetic crime boss. In the end, Joe 3’s actions may have ensured the kid went evil. A version who couldn’t have been hurt by a Joe turned evil, maybe this kid with a different path wouldn’t. No guarantee of good, but he avoids the near-guarantee of evil that Joe’s actions gave him.

And that is the main reason that Looper isn’t my favorite Bruce Willis time travel movie, the other being that 12 Monkeys is just superior.

Swamp Thing

Finished Moore’s run on Swamp Thing the other day. It was a nice reinvention, which does seem to be Moore’s… I don’t want to say gimmick. Niche, maybe. I know the story continues past Moore, but there’s so very much to read. I wonder why making heroes reinvented environmentalists is usually so popular (just look at Animal Man). It definitely dragged a bit sometimes, and there were logical issues, but overall it was pretty good. I have to say, though, for all the hype he gets about being a plant god, he’s not that tough by DC standards. And I didn’t like his reasoning for not making Africa lush. “If I make things better, people will feel fine with making them worse”. That’s bad reasoning. There are constantly-expanding deserts and people dying of hunger, I think the benefits of pulling that ol’ “Garden of Eden” routine outweigh the costs. You did it to Rann. What, is Rann that much better than earth? I notice that alien planets are exempted from the “we’re superheroes, we don’t change the status quo” thing. Superman goes to another planet and sees Mongul has taken over, he beats him down and creates a democracy. But when a coup happens on earth, suddenly it’s “not his place” to interfere.

Brave and the Bold

Finally finished the last episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold. That was a wonderful finale to a brilliant show. I mean, it’s written by Paul Dini, who was in charge of the most acclaimed Batman cartoon ever made, so quality is already expected. Bat-Mite gets irritated that the show has jumped the shark, and wants a return to the darker Batman of old, like the one in the also fantastic episode Chill of the Night. To pull this off, he gives Batman an irritating family, obvious toy-company tie-ins, his own Scrappy Doo equivalent, and even replaces Aquaman’s voice with a much worse one. But then Ambush Bug, of all people, steps in to try to stop it. It even ends with a parody of the next Batman cartoon, and a bunch of executives cancelling the show. In the end, it was a nice take on the nature of the show, and I have a long history of loving things that deal with the ever-changing nature and tone of Batman. Goodbye, excellent cartoon friend.

Neil Gaiman: Ray Bradbury